Great Leopard Spots

Features in Leopard (Apple Mac OS X 10.5.x) that absolutely I love

Yes, a lot of these are part of the 300 that really make Leopard a great OS. I no particular order of priority.

• Searching in Activity Monitor for a particular process by its first letter

Yes, its finally here! Just hit the first key of the process' name and you'll find it. This is more easier if you sort by process name.

• Active repartitioning in Disk Utility
  
• Time Machine
• CoverFlow
• Spaces
• AirPort connection info (press Alt/Option when clicking on AirPort icon on menu bar)
• BootCamp is official!
• 
  

Stuff still not there!

• Good multi-display support
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Switchin'

Recently I acquired a new MacBook Pro (2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 200 GB HDD, 256 MB Nvidia 8600M GT). And switching from my MacBook (Tiger) to the new machine could not have been easier. Leopard's Migration Assistant asked me to run the MacBook in Firewire mode, hook up a firewire cable between the two and 'boom', in 30 minutes all my data and settings were moved over - INCLUDING APPLICATIONS like Thunderbird, Firefox and others. I clicked on Thunderbird, entered my password and had my corporate email going without ANY EFFORT!

Only glitch was the need to reinstall our Cisco VPN client because it seemed to be binded to the old machine's network adapters (or something like that!).

You can call that a serious saving of time and heartburn! Less than 1 hour to switch to a new machine - from start to finish. The migration of applications was much faster than having to install them one by one and configuring them to my settings. Kudos to the Migration Assistant team of Leopard.

And the best part will be the ability to use Time Machine to backup my data everyday - automatically. I and others in the company who travel a bit have seen laptops suffer catastrophic failures at the worst time. Recently we spent a few thousand dollars to retrieve data from a failed hard disk.

Four Horsemen (Versions) of Apocalypse (Vista)

Okay, the title is a little dramatic. But you have to imagine the pain that product managers at 1000's of small & medium companies are going through: testing your product on four versions of 'one' operating system - and that is before the service pack. Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate!

Sure its one OS, but they do have different capabilities (especially for graphics) and you can't leave this to chance. Plus the drivers issue that's been plaguing lots of users creates an additional complexity - "hmm, our product works on our machines, but will it work on the users machine?" . Users, both consumers & business/enterprise customers, are likely to buy systems with any of these four. That means IT and testing have to have provide access to all four of them (with or without SP?) to all/most of the developers. And testing teams need full & dedicated access too. Fortunately VM's have made this task a lot easier.

Mobile Internet with your Cable bill?

So the big news/rumor of the day is the possible investment by cable co's (Time Warner & Comcast) in the Sprint + Clearwire WiMAX venture. The said deadline is the CTIA show in Vegas from Apr 1-3.

So what could this mean for consumers?
People who signup for an Internet service from cable companies get the option of a mobile service also that allows them to use their laptops and WiMAX mobiles anywhere. The home network is connected via the standard cable modem for really high-speed service (~ 5 Mbps), with the lowest latency and no battery life concerns. Mobile/portable devices access the WiMAX network (~ 1 to 2 Mbps) seamlessly, at home and outside. WiMAX femtocells could also be a future offering to quickly improve coverage by using a provisioned part of the cable network bandwidth.

What packages+pricing could be offered?
Cable Internet: $45
Mobile Internet: $25
Mobile VoIP: $15 all you can eat
Total: $75 to $85

Mobile VoIP is the operator's own VoIP service for those who want better quality/SLA than Skype which is likely to go under Best Effort (BE) traffic on a WiMAX traffic versus operator VoIP on ertPS (enhanced real-time Polling Service).

What would be interesting to see is how they would 'throttle' or 'shape' the traffic based on demand and match it with WiMAX QoS classes. Cable companies have been aggressively trying to limit bandwidth hogs and they definitely want to do this on an 'open-garden' wireless network. On an open device it will be impractical to forcefully tag each user installed application with a specific QoS class. Carrier apps like VoIP and carrier offered services will have pre-assigned classes. Will this be necessarily at higher classes than user/3rd party apps and how will it interplay with net-neutrality 'rules'?

Option 1: All applications go through a BREW/Nokia/Apple iPhone style signing & certification requirement. All signed applications are allocated a specific QoS class that cannot be changed by users. Unsigned applications are always forced to be Best Effort by the device.

Option 2: Free for all. Let applications and users decide.

Obviously, this is all water under the bridge (eh?), Sprint has probably decided on their model already. I notice inklings of extending/replicating the Sprint Dev./Partnership program (for EVDO & Nextel LBS) for WiMAX. Sprint execs have already talked about 'open' access, but no SLA guarantees at this point.

But the most important thing will be to keep the plans simple and make great devices available. I can't imagine having to deal with the day+night/weekend minutes plan in the data world.

WiMAX does offer some interesting options for dynamic network management & business models:
- allocate more 'streams/sessions' for VoIP at peak times (8 to 10 am, 4 to 7 pm)
- in emergencies, first responders can have higher priority access and normal users get best effort web & text service that does not tax the air interface
- allow signed app. service providers to bid for better QoS or atleast pay more for better QoS
- ESPN and mlb.com pay for a signed app. that delivers better quality (even Skype could), while YouTube is okay with best effort
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Ofcourse this kind of dynamic network management would require lots of additional standards or one carrier on a large enough network (Sprint + Clearwire with a nationwide footprint).

Accessing Exchange Email via Thunderbird on Mac

Opening attachments on my MacBook (Tiger) was a huge pain after switching to an Exchange email server. Double-clicking an attachment would launch the concerned application but would not download the entire file from the email server - while Outlook Web Access worked perfectly. The attachment files in the temporary folder would always be 24 KB. Finally a solution somebody suggested in a forum: there is an error in reporting attachment sizes, so make Thunderbird download the message 'entirely' instead of 'chunks'. It works! Back to some real work.

From Mozillazine:
"Thunderbird may truncate the attachments. Exchange and Gmail are know to cause this problem.

Go to the Config Editor, and enter chunks in the filter box. Toggle mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks to false. That will make Thunderbird ignore the incorrect information."

Best PC Utility - PC Wizard

This is one of my favorite Windows PC utilities. It's called PC Wizard. It provides very detailed and accurate information on your computer. I have used it often on Dell's and Apple computers (when running on the Windows-side using BootCamp or even under a VM like Parallels). The details it provides are amazing: CPU and hard disk temperature gauges, current processor speed, memory/RAM details... stuff that most operating systems don't provide. A nice to have feature would be the ability to log time-indexed information like processor speed, temperature and so forth. That way you can see how intensively is the machine being used.

Books

Books I am reading (to be continuously updated)

• Charlie Wilson's War by George Crille
• Legacy of Ashes, the History of CIA by Tim Weiner
• Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey Moore